scholarly journals Antikythera Mechanism and the Ancient World

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-19 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. N. Safronov
Keyword(s):  
Radiocarbon Dating ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Mediterranean Area ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Historical Events ◽  
Direct Participation ◽  
Close Proximity ◽  
Backward Prediction

In this historical review, the opinions of Ancient Greece philosophers, astronomers, and poets such as Thales Milesian, Pythagoras, Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Archimedes, Cicero, Diogenes Laertius, Iamblichus, Plutarch, Homer, and Aratus about the planet position calculations and about the possibility of predictions of natural phenomena are analyzed. The planet positions were predicted before Eudoxus (probably before Philolaus) by a spindle of Ananke and after Eudoxus by Antikythera mechanism. Following Pythagoras and Plato, it is established that the regular seismoacoustic observations were performed. In the Ancient World in the Mediterranean area, there was an extensive network of acoustic stations (~10 pcs), which were located in close proximity to the geologic faults. Also, it is shown that the ship that was carrying Antikythera mechanism (A-Ship) was built in 244 BC in Syracuse with direct participation of Archimedes and Archias from Corinthian. Later, the A-Ship was a part of the Roman Republic safety system. The grain volumes, which were delivered to Rome city by large grain vessels, and the population of Rome city in the period 74–71 BC were estimated. Planetary calculator might be used for the chronology of the historical events as a backward prediction in addition to present Radiocarbon dating and Dendrochronology methods.

Cosmopolitan Classicism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefano Evangelista
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
French Language ◽  
Personal Freedom ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Classical Reception ◽  
Modern France ◽  
Pierre Louys ◽  
Hellenistic Greece

Oscar Wilde associated ancient Greece and modern France as the homelands of artistic autonomy and personal freedom. France and the French language were crucial in his adoption of a cosmopolitan identity in which his close emotional and intellectual engagement with the ancient world also played a key role. His practices of classical reception therefore have roots in the French as well as English traditions. Wilde’s attitude towards ancient Greece initially shows the influence of French Parnassian poetry. As time goes on, however, he starts to engage with the new images of the ancient world promoted by Decadence and Symbolism, which sidelined the Greek classicism idealized by the Parnassians in favour of Hellenistic and Latin antiquity. Particularly important to Wilde were his exchanges with French Symbolist authors Marcel Schwob and Pierre Louÿs, whose writings on Hellenistic Greece are in dialogue with Wilde’s works, notably ‘The Critic as Artist’ and Salomé.

Warfare and Environment in the Ancient World

2013 ◽  
pp. 127-140
Author(s):  
J. Donald Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Natural Environment ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Near East ◽  
Mediterranean Area ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Direct Effects ◽  
Environmental Properties ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Ancient Warfare ◽  
The Military

This chapter deals with ancient warfare and the environment. Hunting was often been considered as a form of warfare, and art frequently portrayed humans in battle with animals. Armed conflict had its direct influences on the environment. Along with damage to settled agriculture, warfare had affected other lands such as pastures, brush lands, and forests. It is noted that birds, pigs, bears, rodents, snakes, bees, wasps, scorpions, beetles, assassin bugs, and jellyfish have been employed as weaponized animals in ancient warfare, which, in the Mediterranean area and Near East, had vital environmental properties. The direct effects of battle have been shown by ancient historians, but just as important were the influences of the military-oriented organization of societies on the natural environment and resources.

Spies in Ancient Greece

1998 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. A. Richmond
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Strategic Plan ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Military Policy ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Independent States ◽  
The Mediterranean

This paper is written to give some account of the part played by secret agents against foreign states. Only in the most incidental way will it mention secret agents who tried to detect internal dissent and conspiracy. Plato thought that all Greek states were in a permanent state of war, declared or undeclared. Even in modern times no two independent states have totally identical interests, and when negotiating about clashes of interests, in peacetime just as in war, any government will seek a position in which it can keep its own secrets and discern those of the opposing side. We know very little of Greek spying in time of peace. When diplomacy failed, Greek states could have recourse to war to attain their objectives. War requires some strategic plan of intended operations. In modern conditions many experts must have a hand in devising the plan, and it must be prepared well in advance. In the ancient world things were simpler. One wonders how many Carthaginians knew, or had to know, that Hannibal intended to march round the Mediterranean and attack Italy. Certainly he took the Romans by surprise. The execution of the plan is best entrusted so far as possible to a single commander, even in modern times. We know next to nothing about how military policy was determined in peacetime, but we have a little more information about conditions in times of war.

A Discussion of Josiah Ober’s The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 1142-1143
Author(s):  
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Theoretical Concepts ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Theoretical Account ◽  
Political Inquiry ◽  
Greek World

Ancient Greece has long exercised a powerful hold on the imagination of modern political science. But until fairly recently, this influence has largely been philosophical, related to the origins of many theoretical concepts—including the concept of politics itself—in the ancient world. In The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece, Josiah Ober offers a synoptic and ambitious social theoretical account of the ancient Greek world, the sources of its power, the causes of its decline, and the lessons that can be drawn from this story for contemporary social and political science. We have thus invited a range of political scientists to comment on Ober’s account of classical Greece and its relevance to contemporary political inquiry.

Ancients and Moderns

1990 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 289-303 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald McCloskey
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Historical Review ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Narrative History ◽  
American Historical Review ◽  
Narrative Model ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Poetic Prose

The battle between narrative history and social scientific history, which has broken out again in the pages of the American Historical Review, is a new battle of ancients and moderns. Like many battles of the books, it is deeply foolish and tends to bring the reading of books into disrepute.It is the old battle of the sciences against art, poetry, and the humanities, refought in history as analysis against narrative, model against story, number against word. The official battle was joined in the seventeenth century. Plato banished poets from the Republic, of course, but his notion that science and poetry are adversaries was not taken up in the ancient world. Plato himself wrote poetic prose, Lucretius a few centuries later presented an atomistic physics in poetry, and down to Galileo and beyond the dialogue served science as much as it served comedy and tragedy.

Genocide in the Ancient World

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans van Wees
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
European Literature ◽  
Trojan War ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The Face ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Perceived Challenge

This article examines genocide in the ancient world, by examining European literature and comparing the atrocities committed during the events of the Trojan War. The massacre of all Troy's male inhabitants and the enslavement of its women and children were fictional, but it had many counterparts in ancient history. It was almost the normative form of genocide in ancient Greece and some other parts of the ancient world, although mass enslavements and mass executions which made no distinctions of gender or age are also widely attested. The Greeks' reasons for treating the Trojans so brutally were typical of the motivations for genocide in antiquity: it was usually an act of ‘conspicuous destruction’, a display of force designed to assert the power and status of the perpetrator in the face of a perceived challenge. Ancient genocide sometimes had a religious dimension.

42.—Oceanography, The First Science.

1972 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 425-427
Author(s):  
R. A. Home
Keyword(s):  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Ernst Cassirer ◽  
Essay On Man ◽  
Nature Of Matter

‘Science,’ wrote Ernst Cassirer in his Essay on Man, ‘begins with a quest for simplicity.’ Remarkably enough, tradition has preserved the name of the man who first undertook such a quest: the first scientist. He was Thales of Miletus (ca 624–545 b.c.), one of the Seven Wise Men of the ancient world and the founder of the great Ionian school of natural philosophy. He appears to have been the first to have found the courage to abandon traditional mythopoetic explanation and to try and account for natural phenomena in terms of natural forces. As Aristotle, incidentally, the last of the Ionian scientists, put it, Thales was the founder of the philosophy which asserts that ‘the principles which (are) of the nature of matter (are) the only principles of all things’ (Aristotle a).

scholarly journals AESTHETIC EVALUATION IN OLD RUSSIAN LITERARY MONUMENTS

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
М.Вас. Пименова
Keyword(s):  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Surrounding Area ◽  
Aesthetic Evaluation ◽  
Value Differences ◽  
Religious Ritual ◽  
Old Russian ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
Church Decoration ◽  
Architectural Structures

Статья посвящена диахроническому подходу к изучению аксиологии. Говорится о древнем синкретизме оценки и его постепенном расщеплении в связи с возникновением ценностных различий между внутренним и внешним. Рассматривается языковое выражение эстетической оценки в оригинальных памятниках литературы Древней Руси. Приводятся контексты проповеди, жития, летописи, хождения, «похвалы» празднику, повести, обращения к князю, торжественного «слова», в которых описываются единичные объекты и явления действительности (внешность человека, архитектурные сооружения, церковное убранство, религиозный ритуал, окружающая местность, природные явления), т.е. определяется «Что прекрасно?» (вопрос, поставленный еще в Древней Греции Сократом и Платоном). Подчеркивается необходимость дальнейшего изучения отражения в языке эстетической оценки (‘красиво’ – ‘безобразно’) для демонстрации процесса становления эстетики как науки, отвечающей на второй («парный») философский вопрос античности «Что такое прекрасное?». The article is devoted to the diachronic approach to the study of axiology. It is said about the ancient syncretism of evaluation and its gradual splitting due to the emergence of value differences between internal and external. The article considers the language expression of aesthetic evaluation in the original monuments of literature of Ancient Russia. The context of a sermon, a life, a chronicle, a walk, a «praise» for a holiday, a story, an address to the Prince, a solemn «word», which describes individual objects and phenomena of reality (human appearance, architectural structures, Church decoration, religious ritual, the surrounding area, natural phenomena), that is, defines «What is beautiful?» (a question posed in Ancient Greece by Socrates and Plato). The article emphasizes the need to further study the reflection of aesthetic evaluation in the language (‘beautiful’ – ‘ugly’) to demonstrate the process of formation of aesthetics as a science that answers the second («paired») philosophical question of antiquity «What is beautiful?».

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